


The Angel

by FriendlyBoi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angel Wings, Angel/Demon Relationship, Angel/Human Relationships, F/M, M/M, Teenage Drama, Teenagers, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:22:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22810129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendlyBoi/pseuds/FriendlyBoi
Summary: Rus was born with wings. The Angel tells the story of Rus as he grows up, all the trials and tribulations of growing up as a teenager, with or without the wings.





	The Angel

The boy stood all the way up on the top of the roof on its edge overlooking the cityscape. His body was aching all over his scrawny, frail figure. Bleeding cuts, deep bruises, and faint scars riddled his skin all over. The wings on his back stretched out and the white feathers upon them felt the cold breeze, while the strong muscles inside them crackled and ached. There were a few things pressing against his thigh from inside the pockets of his torn sweatpants. In the left, there was his cellphone, his wallet, and a pencil. In the right, there was a pocket knife, a lighter, and a half-empty pack of gum. “This is it,” he whispered, the scent of cigarettes and cheap alcohol trailing along his breath. It wasn’t always like this, though. He wasn’t always like this.

His life started well, very well even. He was born to a loving married couple, Christopher and Nina Strauss. It wasn’t enough that he was their first and only child, but now they had the wings to worry about. It was clear to the doctors and to even them, that the first-time parents would have a serious handful ahead of them. After about six months or so, through all the trouble that the boy got them and himself into, the parents had finally come up with a name for him. They deliberated, and then decided to name him Icarus, after the famous Greek myth. However, his parents took to calling him Rus for short, and so that’s who he became. Rus, the boy with wings. The angel.

The first few years of his life, to him at least, were blissful. The same could not be said for his parents’ experiences. They rarely left the house with the boy, and instead kept themselves cooped up inside. Nina would be tasked with going out to get groceries, while Christopher made sure to keep the boy inside the house. One day, though, Rus managed to crawl outside and away from the house and his father, and hovered around the neighborhood. Nina, who was walking home with the groceries she’d bought, was fortunate enough to find the boy. She dropped all of her bags and they crashed to the floor. Eggs broke within the bag and spilled out all over the concrete of the sidewalk. She jumped up and caught the boy, frightened, but relieved that he was safe.

The people walking around her were taken aback. Almost all of them had stopped and looked to them. What they saw was a freak of a human, a baby boy with white bird wings. And they saw his mother too, a crazy woman that treated this child like it was the most precious thing in the world. It was abnormal to them. It was different. And that meant that under all circumstances, it was wrong. A month later, some of the members of the neighborhood banded together in secret and got the family evicted. Even later, once her boss got wind of the incident, Nina was laid off from her job at a solar plant in town.

Forced to relocate and to find a new home with little money, the parents moved into the industrial district in the city. They lived in a shoddy apartment with horrid plumbing and lights that would flicker regularly. Rus didn’t mind at all. He was a happy little boy, all while his parents scrambled around and struggled to put food on the table. Soon, school started up, and Rus was now required to go outside of his house, and worse, be around other kids.

Thankfully, the first few years of school were okay. Rus was an exceptionally bright boy, and always did well academically. But socially, Rus was an outcast once he reached fourth grade. He had no friends and all the other children would point and stare and call him names under their breath. At one point, one of the children had even gotten physical with him. It was at recess, and Rus was calmly swinging on the swings alone in the corner of the playground. 

He was swinging up and down, and up and down, and again and again until he’d get enough force, when he’d jump off and hover back down to the mulch with his wings. The boy came over once Rus had just landed back onto the mulch. Rus was in fourth grade, and the other boy was in fifth, and was significantly bigger than Rus. His name was Joseph, but all his friends called him Joey. “What are you doing?”

“I’m playing!” Rus said happily.

“You shouldn’t be playing around here. My mom says you’re a freak.”

“Well that’s mean.” Rus got back onto the swing and started to kick his feet a little bit.

“She’s right.” Joseph walked up to Rus, who slowed down his swinging to a stop, and then pushed him lightly.

“Please don’t do that, Joey.”

“Why not?” Joseph pushed again, harder this time. “We’re just playing.”

“Joey, stop.”

“We’re having fun!” He grunted, and pushed even harder, knocking Rus to the ground.

“Ow!” Rus shouted as he landed onto his back on the mulch with a crunch. “Joey, stop it!” Rus shouted again and got up onto his feet, running his hands along the feathers of his wings, picking pieces of mulch out of them.

“Come on! We’re gonna have fun!” Joseph ran up to Rus again and pushed him over back onto the ground.

“Stop!” Rus got back up again and pushed at Joseph.

“You stop, freak!” Joseph grabbed onto Rus’s shirt and pushed and tugged again and again as Rus grabbed onto his arms to try to get him off.

“Joey!” Suddenly, Joseph threw a punch into Rus’ stomach and the boy fell onto the ground with the wind knocked out of him. Joseph pounced onto the little boy and shoved him into the mulch, keeping him pinned down.

“You look really skinny. Eat something!” Joseph shouted and laughed, grabbing a handful of mulch and shoving it into Rus’ mouth. “Eat, freak!” Joseph pushed it in and punched the boy in the stomach some more while he held him onto the ground. While Rus struggled, other children began to gather around the two of them, smiling and giggling to themselves.

“Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” They all chanted. Rus looked around himself, on the ground, coughing up dirt and mulch. He saw all the kids smiling, and laughing, and pointing at him on the ground. He cried and cried and tried to scream but he couldn’t. It took a few minutes until a teacher finally came over and pulled Joseph off of him. But, by then, Rus had bruises upon bruises marked into his stomach and chest.  
Later, when Rus was brought to the principal’s office, sat right outside the door, his parents were called, as were Joseph’s. Joseph’s parents came first, and Rus could hear them talking and shouting from outside the room. “You’ve gotta be kidding me! My boy? My boy would never!” He heard Joseph’s dad shout.

“It was that freak’s fault! I don’t want that thing anywhere near my son! Ever!” He heard Joseph’s mom shout. The principal sat quietly for a while, and then whispered to the parents. Rus couldn’t tell what he said, but shortly after, the parents emerged with Joseph in tow and left the school, grins on their faces. Rus waited hours and hours, and soon all the staff except the principal and the janitors left. Most of the school was dark. At around seven o’clock at night, Nina ran through the hallways to the principal’s office, and wrapped her son up in a hug.

“Oh, my baby boy. I missed you so much,” she cried.

“Ow, ow,” Rus said, the aches in his bruises growing as his mother squeezed him tightly.

“I’m sorry, baby!” She let go and grabbed onto his hand, standing him up. She knocked on the door with a closed fist and in a few moments the principal opened it and the two of them filed inside and took seats across from the principal’s desk. “What happened?”

“Mrs. Strauss, during recess, your son got into an altercation with another student.”

“What?” She was dumbfounded.

“The teacher on duty saw Rus lay hands on the other boy and then they began to fight.”

“That’s not how it happened! Joey started it!” Rus spoke up, a hand placed on his stomach to calm the pain of the bruises.

“Are you calling the teacher a liar, boy?”

“No…” Rus trailed off.

“Good. And don’t speak out of turn again,” the principal said, and then let out a low “freak” from under his breath, which neither of them heard. “Now, Mrs. Strauss, if you don’t punish your child, I will be forced to have him suspended.”

“You don’t get to do that. You can’t talk to my son like that. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Ma’am, you better watch yourself.”

“I will do whatever I please. Come on, Rus, we’re leaving.” Nina grabbed her child’s hand and stormed out of the school back to their home. When they got there, the lights were all out. It was the dead of winter, and thankfully the heat was still on. “Honey, why are all the lights off?” Nina asked, looking around after closing the door. There were candles lit all around.

“They cut off our lights.”

“What? How come?” She shouted.

“I told them to. It was either we kept the lights on or we kept the heating on. I chose the heating. I got the candles from Ms. Jenkins in 2B, if you’re wondering.”

“You’re kidding right?” While Rus ran into his room at the back of the apartment, Nina walked over to one of the walls. She placed her hand against it and traced it up, where she found the light switch. Flicking it up and down a few times, she noticed that the lights were indeed cut off, just as Christopher had said. “Damn.” A few weeks later, the parents pulled their boy from school and managed to get Ms. Jenkins to homeschool him. He was taught like this all through elementary and middle school. But, when Ms. Jenkins died of heart disease the summer after eighth grade, Rus had no choice but to go back to public school.

“I don’t want to go! I don’t!”

“Rus, you have to,” Christopher pleaded.

“You know what they think of me? You know what they’re gonna say about me? What they’ll do to me?” Rus shouted, with tears staining his pale face. He had developed a vitamin deficiency which made his skin bleached and sickly pale. His body was extremely skinny because he barely ate.

“I know, baby. I know,” Nina said, taking him into her arms, “but we don’t have a choice.”

“Get off me!” Rus shouted, and pushed his mother away from him, walking to the front door. He opened it and slammed it behind him. Walking through the streets of the city, people ran from him or quickly got out of his way as he passed them. Small children pointed and laughed at him from behind windows as he walked by with ripped shirts and pants. The air smelled of pollution and cigarettes and a thick smog drifted down to his feet. With his head down, he observed each crack, each crevice in the sidewalk.

His first day as a freshman in high school was uneventful. He talked to one person in his first-period class, biology, and they would later become his closest friend. The year passed by alright. Of course, he would always get the occasional insult or shove while walking through the hallway. But, he had his friend now, and that made him feel better.

Days would go by quicker. Each day after the final bell rang in school, Rus and his friend would go across the street to his friend’s house where they would eat, and play video games, and laugh. Where they would smile. Genuinely. Things were going okay, and the year ended without any major problems. His friend even kind of liked Rus’ wings. Sometimes the two of them would go out to the old cornfield down the road from the school and Rus would fly up into the air and do tricks while his friend sat at the edge of the grass.

Sophomore year started, and things got a bit harder. The year previous, Rus and his friend had all their core classes together. Now though, they didn’t have a single class in common. They still had lunch to hang out, and of course, they still hung out after school at his friend’s house. But, it was different. It was worse. The other students in his class, some of whom he knew the year before, became meaner. People he knew as fairly tolerant to him were now bitter and cruel. After they’d leave the class, when Rus started walking out of the room, they’d push him over by the backpack, which was much too heavy, and he’d fall to the ground.

A real shock hit him in October of the school year. It was the week before Halloween, and Rus was getting his costume together at his friend’s house, and was there well into the night. He was going to go as an angel. His friend thought it was weird and suggested he go as a superhero or something that didn’t put focus on the wings. But Rus insisted he’d go as an angel, halo and all. While they were crouched on the floor, putting gold glitter all over the halo, the cellphone in Rus’ pocket began to buzz and ring. He picked it up and then went silent. Tears began to roll down his cheeks, and his head was held down, looking at the ground. When the person on the other end hung up, he sat with the phone still up to his ear, the call tone droning in his ear.

It was his father on the other end. He was at the hospital. Nina had gotten into an accident, hit head-on at full speed by a drunk driver. The funeral was the weekend after, and Rus was utterly devastated. He said nothing at the funeral. No eulogy at the ceremony. No parting words as the casket was lowered into the ground. No ‘I’ll miss her’ when a family member or friend asked how he was. It was only when they got home after when he really let everything out. He walked into his room and took off all his clothes, letting his suit, his pants, his tie, his underwear, his socks, all fall to the ground, and then he just stared into the mirror. He looked at the angel costume hanging up over it, at the halo. He huffed and grunted as he quickly walked over to it and grabbed it, then threw it across the room. Crying, he stared into the mirror, and then punched it hard. It shattered in place, and his hand was all cut up.

He spent the next months with bandages around his hand, stained with blood. Out of nowhere, more and more bruises showed up on his knuckles. These marks coincided with the dents and the holes that began to appear on the walls of his room. Somehow, he managed to get a girlfriend, a girl who he saw everyday in his math class. Things got better. She said she loved his wings, and that made him smile. They did everything together. She had joined him and his friend in their little group and they all instantly clicked. Another school year passed and Rus finished with good grades, and two friends. People hadn’t been as cruel to him the rest of that year.

The next year, junior year, was a little different. The first few months passed smoothly. But, throughout, Rus and his girlfriend began having problems. They would get into arguments on a weekly basis, and Rus was starting to get suspicious. His girlfriend had a friend that she was very friendly with. He didn’t like this friend. He became jealous almost, and insecure, and it drove him mad when he couldn’t spend time with her, but that friend could. Eventually, it got so bad, that the two of them broke up.

A week later, his girlfriend, now ex, began dating that friend. Rus had accumulated a fairly good sized group of friends by this point. Once they got wind of it, Rus didn’t know what to do. ‘They’ll call me a coward. I’m the freak again. They’re gonna make fun of me for years,’ he thought to himself. So, when they asked what had happened to make them break up, Rus lied. “She cheated on me with that one guy,” he said. He got sympathy from his friends. But, there was something wrong with it. There was still the guilt gnawing at the back of his head. He was still friends with his ex, and would text her regularly. She was one of his best friends, after all. But he couldn’t let go, and he didn’t.

Junior year ended and Rus became severely depressed. Things got worse and worse and the thoughts in his mind grew worse and worse. In a last ditch effort, when a classmate invited him to a party in September of senior year, he accepted. None of his friends went, because they weren’t the partying type. But, Rus went, despite him hating parties, because maybe it would make him happier. He got into the alcohol and got drunk, and the students around him at the party were all cheering for him. The sound of music beating and the smell of sweat and alcohol filled the air. Cigarettes were passed around, and Rus took part in that too. Soon, he blacked out, and in the morning, he woke up in the middle of the junkyard downtown.

He brought his head up, and his brain began to ache wildly. His eyes opened to the bright sun and his whole body hurt. When he looked down, he saw cuts and bruises all over his bare chest. Along his chest, on top of the pale skin and his ribs which could be seen through, in red sharpie there was written ‘FREAK.’ That was it. It was the last thing that needed to happen. He walked home with a limp, no shirt and torn pants. Blood dripped down from the cuts in his chest and the bruises ached with a sharp pain. People looked at him and some gasped, but he didn’t pay any attention. He was used to it.

When he got home, his father was asleep. The sun shone through the windows and illuminated the family pictures hanging up on the shelf along the wall. He walked over to the frame with the photo of his mother, took it into his hand, and turned it around as he set it back down on the shelf. His head turned to the liquor cabinet and he walked over to it and opened it. He reached his hand in and grabbed the bottle of rum his dad always drank from on Friday nights after Rus had fallen asleep. Rus unscrewed the cap, and without hesitation, he drank it all down and then dropped the bottle to the ground.

He walked over to the kitchen counter and put his pocket knife and his lighter in his right pocket, along with the pack of gum he kept. He walked back to the front door and opened it, stepped outside and made his way up to the roof. Climbing the ladder on the side of the apartment building, Rus scratched at the scars and the cuts on his chest. He made it to the top and he sat near the edge on the side of the generator and grabbed the pack of cigarettes he kept up there. Rus pulled the lighter from his pocket, and lit the cigarette which he placed into his mouth between his lips.

He began crying as the smoke left his lips. Everything was getting to him. Life had gotten to him. When he finished the cigarette, he put it out on his bare shoulder and then flicked the butt over the edge of the roof. He pulled his cellphone from his left pocket and turned it on. He navigated through the screen to the phone app and called the contact at the top. “Hey,” the voice on the other side said.

“Hey, man.” Rus held back tears in his voice.

“You okay, dude?” It was Rus’s friend. “We were all worried about you last night. You didn’t text us after the party. Did something happen?”

The bruises on his chest and on his knuckles started to ache more and more. He could feel the blood trickle down from the cuts on his chest, past the ‘FREAK’ in sharpie. “Yeah, man. Just… tired as all shit.”

“I’ll bet. Hey, get some sleep alright?”

“Yeah,” Rus said. His friend on the other side hung up and Rus looked back down at his phone. He scrolled through the contacts and found the next one. It rang, and rang, and then the person picked up.

“Rus? What’s up?”

“Hey. Just wanted to call and see how you were doing,” Rus said. He was beginning to get teary-eyed again.

“I’m fine. I’m with my boyfriend right now,” she paused, “is something wrong?”

“No. Just tired.”

“You sure?”

“Yep,” he put a fake smile on his face, choking back more and more tears.

“Okay. Try taking a nap. I gotta go. Goodbye, Rus,” she abruptly hung up and Rus was left with the dial tone before he could say it back. He looked back down at the phone and found the next contact, then tapped and called it.

“Hey, buddy. I just woke up. What is it?”

“I didn’t mean to bother you, dad. Um, how was work last night?”

“Eh, you know how it can be.”

“Yeah,” Rus said and laughed, while the tears started to crawl down his cheeks from the bottoms of his eyes. “It can be pretty boring.”

“Everything okay, kiddo?”

“Yeah… Yeah, dad. I’m alright. Just wanted to see what was up. I’ll let you get back to sleep. I love you,” he said, masking the tears from his voice.

“I love you too, bud. Stay safe.” His dad hung up and Rus was left staring down at his phone. Tears streamed from his face and fell onto the screen of his phone as he scrolled and scrolled to the bottom to find the last contact. He found it, and it took him a good couple of minutes to work up the strength to tap the screen and place the phone up to his ear.  
It rang for a second before blaring: “the number you have dialed is no longer in service, we apologize,” before hanging up and leaving the dial tone.

“Hey mom,” Rus said, speaking to the dial tone. “I know you can’t hear me. But… but, goddammit I wish you could.” The tears ran all the way down his face and down his neck, where they dripped and fell onto his chest and stung at the cuts. “I miss you so much, mom. I miss you. I’m… I’m sorry. I love you.” He hung up and turned off the phone, then placed it back into his pocket with his wallet and the pencil.  
He walked to the edge of the roof, and stood. The cold breeze blew across his bare chest, and as he looked out at the city, his heartbeat slowed down. His wings stretched out and the muscles crackled and ached. Time had gotten to him. The days and the words and the people got to him. Life had gotten to him, finally. He smiled widely and he began laughing, and crying, and dug his fingernails into the skin of his chest. His shoes gripped the edge of the roof, and he swayed back and forth. Then, he leaned forward, and he brought his wings closed and close to his back. His feet left the roof and he began plummeting headfirst toward the ground. He closed his eyes and felt all the wind rushing past him. And, for once in a long time, he smiled. Rus, the boy with wings. The angel.

Rus fell. He fell and descended down and down toward the ground. The sidewalk came closer to view, and as his smile shifted to a smirk, he flapped his wings and caught the wind. Up he went back into the air, his wings flapping and holding him up in the air, until all of a sudden he began to soar. The porcelain white wings took him all the way across town from where his apartment building was all the way to a diner he’d pass on the way to school. From there he reached the school, but looking down at it, he kept flying. He flew past his friend’s house, past the field where he’d do tricks in the air in freshman and sophomore year of school, all the way to the town cemetery. He hovered in the air for a while. It seemed like forever, his wings flapping and his heart thumping while his eyes just stared down to the ground. He hadn’t come here since sophomore year. Two whole years he was apart, scared of coming here. But Rus thought differently now.

He flew down quickly and came to a landing in the empty little graveyard. Each headstone was kept well, clean, stocked with flowers even after people had stopped visiting. Rus had met the groundskeeper, once, at the funeral, a little old man named Dante that lived in the tiny yellow house just a short walk from the cemetery. He was a nice man. Rus remembered a moment after the funeral. Dante had singled him out from the crowd, nudged him in the side, and held a bundle of flowers. They were clearly freshly picked from his house’s garden. Lilies, his mother’s favorite, he noted. He had smiled and said he’d make sure she was never lonely when Rus and his father were too busy to visit. Rus looked down at the gravestone now, and a few tears rolled down his cheeks. “Sorry I’ve been gone, mom,” he sputtered out through the tears.

His legs began to shake and buckle. He fell to his knees, his breath wheezing as his tears kept coming and coming. “Mom… I’m sorry… I’m sorry I turned out like this. It’s not what you wanted, I know it, I know it’s not what you wanted.” His bare body ached as the wind breezed past the cuts and bruises on his chest. The frailness of his frame made him out to be like a skeleton cowering over its grave. But it wasn’t his name on the grave. “I miss you, mom. I tried calling, but, heh,” he chuckled to himself through the tears, sniffling. “You can’t exactly pick up right now, right?” He leaned back and sat on his butt, letting his legs stretch out in front of him. “After you died, I got a girlfriend. She loved the wings, mom, just like you did. Can you imagine that?” The white wings on his back, once folded up, stretched out, crackling as the muscles inside them caught the wind passing by. “Never really understood it. Those times as a kid, I was so little, and I’d try to cut them off. I never did get very far,” he said. He looked back at them, the feathers stained with a few drops of blood that had flew off his body from the cuts and splattered against them. “Guess I’m too scared, huh?”

His lip quivered after the smiling. He could talk all he wanted, and he did for a while, but the reality of it quickly sank into him. “I can’t really talk to you, can I?” He looked at the gravestone, read the name ‘Nina Strauss,’ the subtitle of ‘Loving Wife and Mother,’ even the words she left for an epitaph. ‘Through all of it I’ll still have my angel.’ He knew who that was supposed to be. “But that’s not me. No matter how hard I try, I’m not her angel, I’m just not,” Rus said quietly, voice faltering through even more tears. The wind blew past. It tousled his pale blond hair, jostling the curls around, getting all in his face. Even if it was just wind, he felt something, something that caused a smile to crawl across his face as another tear fell to the dirt below. “But I can be, mom. I can be your angel.” He stood up and the feathers in his white wings quivered about for a moment. “I will.” At that, he took off into the air again, flapping his wings with a strength he had forgotten he had, bound for home.

He came home to the apartment as he was when he’d left it. His chest was bare, cut up and bruised and stained with permanent marker. But, the marker was smudged, muddled by the sweat that clung to his pale white skin. His platinum blond hair was coated in a thin layer of dirt, a few bigger specks poking out. As his hand reached up to grasp the doorknob, he thought maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here. But, before he could even turn the knob or turn away and leave, the door opened from inside, and his dad stood before him in the doorway. “Rus? Oh my god, son! What the hell happened to you?” He practically jumped from out of the doorway, wrapping Rus in a firm, strong grip of a hug. Immediately as he felt the warmth of his dad’s body on his bare skin he started crying again. “It’s alright, buddy, it’s okay. Okay? It’s okay,” he whispered calmly, pulling the frail boy into the door, rubbing his back with a soft hand.

“Dad, I’’m sorry,” he sputtered out. “I’m so sorry.”

“What?” His dad looked befuddled, a raised eyebrow as he pulled back from the hug for just a second. “What’s there to be sorry about, Rus? So you went to a party, big deal, I went to a ton of them as a high schooler.”

Rus was the one to break away from the hug this time as his dad stood chuckling a little to himself at his own words. “You… You know?”

“Of course I know, Rus. You think a dad doesn’t keep tabs on his son?” He patted the side of his jeans, where a lump sat in his pocket, bulging through the denim. “Your friends called, they sounded worried, but I know you better than that.” He walked forward and reached an arm out to place a hand on his son’s shoulder. “What happened, Rus? Those cuts, the bruises, the… is that sharpie?”

Rus looked sheepish almost. It was as though he was ashamed, his face going flushed, something easily seen as the pink flooded his pale face. “I did go to a party. Some senior party, or whatever, I can’t even remember who invited me. But they didn’t really want me there.” His wings twitched every now and then as he talked, they often did if he was nervous. But only his mom ever really noticed. “They got me high, drunk… er, I got high and drunk. I passed out sometime into the night, and I think they just decided to cut me up and hit me, write stuff on my chest. Pranks, I guess. I don’t think they took pictures or anything so we don’t need to do anything about it alright?”

Rus’s dad didn’t say a word. He just stared for a second at his son, but that second felt stretched, extended to minutes, until he finally moved. He reached forward and pulled his son into another hug. Rus had a sinking feeling in his chest. But, it was vastly outweighed by the bubbling warmth that found its place there too. He was happy. That was all he could really ask for, to be standing with his dad in their crummy apartment. Though his body was covered in cuts and bruises, his face stinging with tear stains, he was still smiling. That night the two of them shared a dinner of takeout Chinese food. It was a local place, Jade Fountain. His mom loved it there. Just eating it brought back memories of eating it when he got sick with strep, the soothing heat of the rice smoothing out the roughness that engulfed his throat. After dinner, he even asked his father to tuck him into bed. A wave of childlike nostalgia washed over him. He thought he wouldn’t be able to tap into that kind of happiness, for so long his life was plagued by hardship, but it wasn’t all horrible.

After that night, there were a few days Rus took off of school to let his wounds heal and to spend more time with his dad. He even got a few days of work off, letting him spend the time with his son. They went fishing, ate out at lunch a few times, played games together. It was a wonderful time. But soon the time to go back to school came, and his senior year was no walk in the park. He walked back into the front doors of the school and was greeted at their usual hangout spot by his two best friends, Seth and Leon, the former who he’d been with when the news of his mother’s accident broke. He stuck with him for these four years in high school. As Rus walked in, his wings fluttered out of his control, slapping against the door frame a bit. “There’s our favorite chicken,” Leon joked.

“Hey guys,” Rus said quietly.

Seth walked up and went for a high five, then grabbed Rus’s hand and pulled him into a hug. “We were worried about you, man. Even gave your dad a call, I was so worried. That party was no joke.” Seth pointed to Rus’s face, which had a still-fading bruise under his eye. “You didn’t get into any fights, did you?”

“No, Seth. No fights.” Rus lifted up his shirt a bit, his wings coming close to his back, feathers drooping downward. There on his stomach, right at the abdomen underneath where his ribcage was, was a scar on his pale skin. “I passed out, and I guess they weren’t too fond of me. Guess it’s going around, huh?”

“Come on, man, don’t say that. They just don’t like the wings,” Leon said.

“My wings?” Rus said. He reached his hand to one of them, rubbed down the feathers, brushing off dust that had gathered on them. “Why does everyone hate my wings?”

“Not everyone, Rus,” Seth said. “I’ve always thought they were badass.”

“Yeah, I mean, you can fly. That’s super cool,” Leon added.

“I guess so,” Rus muttered. He was so unsure of it himself. Yeah, he could fly. But, if he did it in more populated places, he would often get trash thrown at him from below. He wasn’t sure where it was coming from. But, that didn’t matter, it wasn’t really who threw it that stung, it was that anything was even thrown at all. Just then, the bell rang, a loud discordant ring that bounced around the walls in the lobby. “That’s the bell. We should get to class quick, before the teachers notice we’re late.” He walked past the two of them, his head hung sort of low, an odd sense of insecurity replacing the happiness and relief he’d felt just the day before. Of course, he never said anything about it, just kept walking to his first class of the day.

He had made that a habit throughout that senior year of high school. His friends would pester him about what was bothering him, what had him so down and sad all the time. But he never spoke. He never really talked about what it was that nagged his brain so much he couldn’t pick his head up. “I’m just… I’m such a bad person,” he’d say. It was basically fact to him at this point. The lie he had told about his first girlfriend, it ate away at him, the guilt of it all chipping away at his soul. “I can’t really explain why I feel like this, man,” he’d mutter to them during a bout of silence at the lunch table. “But, I must be feeling like this for some reason, right? No one feels like this for no reason. I… I must deserve it,” he said.

“That’s bullshit, man, and you know it,” Leon would usually say. It was blunt, but it was true. No matter how true it was, Rus didn’t think it really was. He was sold that he was really a menace, a villain, someone that deserved to feel as down as he did. So, even the bluntness of Leon wasn’t enough.

Then there came the day where it reached a tipping point. Rus was in one of his moods. It had come after a happy mood, after he had aced his chemistry exam. But something sort of dropped him back down to that low he found himself in far too often. Maybe it was just general dread that did it, or the constant thought that he was the bad guy, that everyone around him that was happy was better than him. Regardless of how he got there, he was low, and his friends noticed quickly. “Rus, what’s got you so down this time?” Seth asked warmly.

“This time? He’s always like this, dude,” Leon said.

“Hey, don’t be like that, Leon,” Seth retorted. He pointed to Rus’s wings, the drooping feathers, the curled up look of them, which usually meant he was sick. But he wasn’t sick exactly.

“Oh come on, Seth, quit babying the guy. He’s always like this and he never says anything beyond ‘I’m just sad and I deserve it,’” Leon said rolling his eyes.

“How do I not deserve it,” Rus asked. He lifted his head from his arms at the table. His wings twitched a bit, a single feather coming off and floating down gently to the tabletop. “Tell me how I don’t deserve the feelings I’m having? How I don’t deserve to be miserable while everyone else is happy.”

“Oh cry me a river!” Leon raised his voice a little bit. A few people at neighboring tables in the cafeteria turned their heads toward the long table the friends sat at. “You completely don’t deserve what you’re feeling, Rus. You don’t. You made a mistake, one that didn’t even hurt anyone, not really. She’s moved on from it, dude. You’re blowing this out of proportion.”

“I am not!” Rus lightly tapped his fist onto the table. A few more heads turned toward their table, toward the commotion that was steadily gathering. “I hurt her, told lies about her, and this is my punishment.”

“Punishment? Are you seriously that vain that you think she cares that much about what you did? She doesn’t care about that shit! She cares that you were an insecure shit stain!” Leon was angry. Even Rus could tell that, the bluntness and brutal honesty was showing through in full force. “Look, I want you to be happy, we all do,” Leon said, and gestured to all the friends that were sat around their lunch table. Seth, Nelson, Bruce, April, all looking at the two friends arguing with one another.

“But I don’t deserve it,” Rus muttered.

“Bullshit,” Leon shouted. “Of course you deserve to be happy. What you did doesn’t matter anymore. You messed up, but what are you gonna do? Let it get to you every moment of every day? You told a stupid lie, you didn’t kill somebody.”

“You think I want to feel like this, Leon?” Rus asked plainly.

“At this point, yeah I think you do,” Leon muttered.

“What?” Rus spat back.

“You get like this so much, and all we ever do is tell you you’re fine. We don’t think you’re the villain, or the bad guy, or whatever the hell you think you are that’s deserving of feeling like shit all the time.” Leon stood up, looking right down at Rus, whose wings were folded up as much as they could be against his back. “I’m tired of giving you this fucking pity. You can’t just say you’re a shitty person, that you feel shitty, and then not try and fix it. You can. But you’re too stuck in feeling like garbage that you don’t do anything. I’m sick of it.” He turned and walked away, as Rus sat staring at a stain on the tabletop. He couldn’t think of anything. All he could really do was feel the lump in his throat stopping him from speaking, the overwhelming storm that was brewing in his stomach, the gray that enveloped his brain so that every thought came through like radio static.

After that, Leon barely even spoke to Rus. He moved on from the friend group entirely it seemed. Rus saw him so infrequently, it was like they were strangers, never having met before, never sharing any good moments like he knew they had. He had moved to another group of friends, even got a girlfriend in a couple months. Meanwhile, it felt like the friends he still had were growing even more distant. Nelson, a junior they had met through a science class, was mostly off doing his own thing with the band he and a few closer friends had started. Then there was Bruce, who wasn’t ever really that involved. But now he was even more detached from them as he spent the lunch periods in detention for poor attendance and missed homework. And April, the only girl of their little group, she was neck deep in applying to every prestigious engineering college she could spot with her eyes. Meanwhile, Rus and Seth didn’t really have much to do besides hang out together.

“Graduation’s coming up,” Rus’s dad spoke up from the kitchen, Seth and Rus sat on the couch in the living room of the apartment nearby.

“You’re right,” Seth muttered. “We’ve only got like a month and a half left, man.”

“What do you think you’ll do, Seth? Been accepted to any good colleges?” Rus’s dad was cleaning out the dishes with a rag. Their dishwasher hadn’t worked in months, probably since Rus started his senior year, so a bit of soapy water and a dishrag was the best that he could do to get the dishes clean.

Seth had the sort of blank expression he’d always had when asked even the most pressing of questions. His eyebrows were furrowed, his eyelids a bit droopy, and his mouth formed in an apathetic shape, like a simple line. “Y’know, I don’t really have much of a clue what I’m gonna do in college, Mr. Strauss.”

“What do you mean,” Rus asked.

“Well, I got accepted to the community college up by Courtney Street,” he answered.

“That’s great! They have a good program for transferring to the better schools in the state. Rus, that’s the one I was talking to you about, the one your counselor gave you the letter for,” Rus’s dad said chipperly. He was smiling bright, eyeing up the letter’s envelope he’d stuck to the fridge with a feather-shaped magnet, a big crest of the college stamped onto it in red. “What are you majoring in?”

“Honestly I have no clue. I mean, I never really gave it much thought, y’know?” Seth didn’t pay much attention to anything but the TV. He was good at that, simultaneously answering the question asked while not bearing it any mind at all. Maybe it was some sort of hidden talent. If you’d asked Rus’s dad though, it probably wouldn’t be. “Guess I’ll do computer science? I like computers enough.”

Rus found it odd that Seth really didn’t have a plan to speak of. He’d always thought that with the way he carried himself, the plain confidence of his best friend, Seth would have had it all figured out. But, he didn’t. That made his mind race. He was simply terrified of the idea of college, of all those people, all in such an unknown world where he knew that they had to have known so much more about it all than him. How could he have known? He was so sheltered, home-schooled from fourth grade until high school. He’d be eaten alive. Every time he thought about the first day of college, of even orientation, his heart dropped clean into his stomach and his mind swam with dread.

“Rus, you applied to Charles Thompson U, right?” Rus’s dad spoke up, and Rus was forced right out of his own head.

“Huh?” Rus managed to get out of his mouth.

“Charles Thompson, the really good school you said you were applying to? They have that music program you were interested in.” He finished with the dishes and walked out into the living room, a huge water stain on the front of his collared shirt. He started to do a few air guitar moves in front of the two friends, strumming the imaginary instrument, headbanging as if he had long locks of hair to toss around in a mosh pit. “I used to play a bit of guitar for the jazz band at my college. I could show you a few pointers,” Rus’s dad said enthusiastically, practically out of breath from the rigorous air guitar he’d performed.

The boy with the wings looked to his dad, and where he would usually feel embarassment, he just felt sad for some reason. But he didn’t let it be known. “Yeah, I applied, and I got accepted,” he said simply. It was true. Of course, for him it wasn’t a source of pride, quite the contrary. It filled him with fear at the thought that he’d be going off to another state to be around so many people that no doubt would hate him.  
But he still went. After graduation, after saying goodbye to Seth and Leon and all his other friends, he came back home dreading the next few months. He’d be going to a whole other state, hours away, hours away from the new house they’d moved into and the town he grew up in and all his friends. It was absolutely daunting. Rus never liked daunting. Sure, he could take to the sky with giant white wings on his back, fly around like a bird, but that was something he could always do. That was nothing to him. This though, this was terror incarnate. The months of that summer passed by like a fleeting wind. They whipped by, one day after the other, like seconds in an hour. And then it was time for his orientation, just a few weeks before his actual first day. “Taking the car, or flying?” His dad joked. But Rus was stone-faced as he walked out of the front door and into the yard. “Well, drive safe, alright?” He said it quieter, walking out with his son, following closely behind him.

“I know, dad,” Rus muttered, sliding into the seat of the beat up little sedan his father had managed to get him. It was supposed to be blue, but time and weather ate away at the paint until it was a darkish gray, with rusty rims on the wheels and a couple scratches that refused to be buffed out. 

He had the window rolled down as his dad peeked his head in. “You know, I still can’t believe this thing can start up.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t,” Rus said, and managed to let out a little chuckle with a half-smile on his face. “But, you just have to jimmy the shifter a little bit.” He looked to his dad, who had a big smile on his face, tears in his eyes, and his heart sank a little bit. “You okay?”

It was as if shaking himself out of a trance. His dad shook his head a bit, a tear or two freeing themselves from his eyes, and he brought up his sleeve to wipe them away quickly. “Hm? Oh, yeah, yeah I’m fine, buddy. Don’t worry about me,” he said. He was clearly getting choked up. Even Rus could tell. The way he was talking, laughing to cut off the feelings, it was like whenever he remembered the better times before his mom died. It was never a fun thing to see. “Well, you should probably get going, huh? Don’t wanna be stuck out on the road all night, do ya?” He brought his hands ahead of him and clapped, as if the sound could free him of the frightening thought of seeing his son off to college.

“Yeah. That’d be pretty bad, huh?” Rus awkwardly gripped at the steering wheel, twiddling his thumbs together.

“I’ll see you during winter break, alright?” Rus’s dad leaned forward once more into the open window of the car and placed a kiss on the top of Rus’s platinum blond hair. The few lingering bruises on Rus’s face stared back at him as he pulled away from the car. “I love you, buddy. You’re gonna do great.”

“Thanks, dad. I love you too,” Rus said quietly. He softly pressed the window button and it came back up, locking into place. His dad stepped around the back of the car and walked all the way up the lawn, stopping at the porch, turning back to see his son drive off into the great unknown. On the road he passed by the high school. He passed by the farmland where he’d show Seth his flying moves, and passed by Seth’s old house, even the diner he used as a landmark. He drove past the cemetary, a sight that hurt his heart and burned his tear ducts. And after that he was on the highway out of the bummy little town he called home. And from there he reached the next town over, a little bit bigger. Then there was a smaller town. After that was the big city nearby, just an hour from his home.

Everything after that big city just sort of blended together into a blurred mess. Once he was far enough away from his home, it all didn’t matter. He blasted some punk rock and alternative music he had grown to love in his early high school days, and he just let his brain be free as he sang. Normally he didn’t sing, he did it quite rarely, only around people he trusted or when he thought he couldn’t be heard. But there in the car was where he felt free enough to nearly shout with his singing. He hadn’t been able to do that in a while it seemed, just let his brain go free. But now, now there was nothing tethering him to all the problems he had back home, all the things he’d gone through and done. Now it was like he could fully spread his wings. They fluttered a bit on his back against the car seat. It was always awkward sitting with them in the car, but he didn’t much care. As he cranked the music’s volume up, rolled down his windows, and sang along at the top of his lungs, he managed a smile. It was a real smile too. A real, absolute, toothy smile that radiated through his body and filled him with energy he didn’t think he could ever have again. 

When he got halfway through the trip to the campus, it was the dead of night. He was out in what felt like nowhere. His body and mind were getting more and more exhausted, his voice shot, his back and wings aching from the sitting position he’d held for hours. He pulled off the main highway into a backroad. It took him onto a wide dirt path, all open fields of farmland, barely a building in sight among the trees he parked his car near. He got out of his car and climbed on top of it. He stretched out his legs and his back, hearing every echoing crack as the muscles and bones loosened up, and then spread out his wings. The white feathers graciously danced in the cool summer night air. He looked up at the stars, bright and plentiful without all the light pollution from the towns and cities, and he laughed to himself. His wings flapped a bit in place as he stood atop his car.

At some point he fell asleep on the roof of the car, awakened by the morning sun peeking out over the hills of the horizon. He got back in his car and pulled out of those backroads and back onto the highway, smiling to himself, not a worry in his mind as familiar songs played from the speakers. He made it all the way to the college campus just as the afternoon was arriving. It was the day before orientation, and as he got there, he was greeted by a rather burly looking man. Now the fear started to come back. “What’re you here for?” He asked in a gruff voice.

“Here for orientation. I know I’m a bit early, but, I came from out of state,” Rus began rambling, but the man, seemingly a security guard, interjected.

“Ah right,” he said with a light smile playing about his lips. “If you’ll look out that way, you’ll see the student parking garage. Just pull your car into there and there should be a few seniors there that’ll help you from there.” He pointed ahead of the road from where they were, at the campus front gates, and lo and behold there was a tall concrete parking garage. It was like any Rus had seen before. Completely and totally normal.

“Th-thank you,” he sputtered out before driving ahead and pulling into the first floor of the garage. He couldn’t find any parking on the first floor, but as he drove through it, there were a bunch of other students gathered around in small groups. A few of the older ones seemed more singled out from the crowds. He pulled closer to the second floor, and one of the older students wearing the Charles Thompson U colors came up to the car. Rus slowed down and then came to a stop, and then rolled down his window. “Hello?”

“Hi! You’re here for orientation, right?” She was chipper, a head of long black hair and a nose piercing staring Rus in the face, along with maybe the widest smile he’d ever seen. “I’m Ashleigh. I’m one of the CTU Welcoming Team. Go Otters!” She pumped her fist like she was a cheerleader, and she very well could have been. She seemed outgoing enough to bring the cheer for any number of sports teams. Rus faintly nodded and she stepped a bit away from the car. “Just find a parking spot, freshman are on the third and fourth floors, and then head to the belltower in the center of campus. All the ones here early are sorted out through there!” She sent Rus off with a wave, and he drove away with a weird twisting feeling in his stomach. He still had that fear, any moment he could mess something up and look like an idiot, and they’d all yet to see his wings. But there was also a bit of relief in his chest. Things weren’t immediately horrible like he’d anticipated.

Orientation was even better than Rus could have expected now that his expectations were shattered. Rus learned about all the various programs, with all of them getting their own little lecture, but calling it a lecture wasn’t exactly accurate. Lectures were boring and soul-draining. He remembered how awful they’d been in high school, told from teachers that couldn’t care less about what they were teaching. But these ones? These teachers cared. Then when all the programs were introduced, students broke off into little groups and went off to different buildings for the programs they had chosen. Along with eight other freshman, eight people to mock and ridicule him, they went to the Neville Layton building, a smaller structure, with pillars at the front and a dome on the top. But the students didn’t ridicule him at all. If anything, they did the exact opposite. There were a few, three of them to be exact, that kind of milled about on their own. Two others gawked at his wings with looks of awe on their faces. But the three others were mesmerized, walking around him with smiles on their faces, asking all sorts of questions.

“Well, since we’re already here, and everyone seems to be fascinated with you, why don’t you introduce yourself first?” The student liaison, a sophomore with a head of thick black and blue dreadlocks named Maya, sat on the stairs to the building and asked.

“Me?” Rus asked, as if he wasn’t being swarmed with attention from the other three.

“Mhm,” Maya nodded her head.

Rus held his wings close to his back, his eyes shaking about with anxiety. He wasn’t used to this kind of attention. His arms and legs started to quiver, but he managed to compose himself, his feathers tightening up in place as he spoke. “I’m Rus. From out of state, but, I’m here to stay.”

“Rus?” One of the other freshman, a guy with wide square-rimmed glasses and swooped up brown hair turned to him. He was one of the ones that were on their own.

“Y-yeah,” he managed to stutter out.

“That short for Russel?” The guy asked, walking a little closer to Rus.

“Icarus, actually,” he said quietly. 

But, everyone heard him. “Icarus? That’s so cool!” One of the girls in particular was especially excited. “I like Icarus better!” She was so bright and cheery, it seemed. Her green eyes went wide when she looked at him. She had auburn hair, a nice middle-ground between red and brown, that shined bright in the light of the noon sun. There were a few freckles on the bridge of her nose, but not a lot, none that you would notice unless you were looking for them. And somehow Rus’s eyes were drawn to them. She had braces that were just dying to come off, and they glinted in the sunlight too. It only took a few moments for her to notice he was staring. But, she soon realized she was staring too, and she quickly got a bit sheepish. “Oh, haha, I’m Faye by the way.” Even her name was sort of magic to him. He just sort of stood there for a couple seconds, eyes fixated on her, the feathers in his wings lightly twitching every now and then. “I um, I love your wings,” she said with a bright smile on her face. The part about it that really stuck with Rus was her smile. It seemed so genuine, seemed so real, and the way she said it was even more sincere.

It wasn’t long before the two got closer. They weren’t outright dating at first. Rus was too scared for that, it seemed, always worried she was just stringing him along to take all the nice things she’d said back. But that time didn’t come. They were hanging out at the campus bookstore one day, a place they often came to when they got out of classes, and were singing along to some mutual favorite music. Rus had a good singing voice that paired well with the acoustic guitar Faye strummed along at, sat atop one of the tables in the cafe at the bookstore. Rus was sat on the floor with his legs crossed. He closed his eyes as he sung as he did when he got so into it, and his wings were dancing about softly. They tilted off to one side first, the feathers fluttering. Then his wings tilted off the other side, moving along with Rus’s body movements, swaying along to the rhythm of the song. It was an original song Faye had played over and over for him, Passing the Days Away. He never really paid attention to the lyrics. It was just the sound, the sound was what really drew him in, reminded him of happier times. But then, all of a sudden, the music stopped.

Rus still sung along, his eyes shut in relaxation. Soon he stopped singing though. “Faye?” She came closer to him and placed a kiss on his lips. Rus didn’t dare open his eyes. His heart practically burned up in the heat that filled his chest. His wings fluttered, the feathers shaking about, until the wings finally unfurled and spread out, knocking over a nearby chair. She pulled away and sat staring at him with a big smile as he opened his eyes. “You… You like me? Like, like me like me?”

“Of course I like you, Icarus. You’re great,” she said. Her guitar was atop the table, the strap of it dangling off the edge. “You want to consider this a date?” She said it plainly, a smile on her face and a latent chuckle in her throat, and he just simply smiled and nodded. “Well alright then, smiley. Let’s get some hot cocoa and talk. Huh?”

Things felt right again. It didn’t feel like his first relationship, it was much different. He felt like she could really be something permanent, and he felt it quickly, only a few weeks into dating her. He remembered his mistakes, but he figured he could work through them. This was a whole new relationship after all. The two grew closer and closer, even got an apartment together a block or so from campus. Rus was already feeling stressed from not being able to go to see his dad during the holiday break, and to make matters worse, he was beginning to wonder if music was something he really wanted to do. He felt alone in his classes again. Sure he had two classes with Faye, but outside of that he had no one. Too many people in his other classes stared at him during lectures and tests. They’d shoot a dirty glance when they thought he couldn’t see. He was a freak, he thought. He wondered if they were plotting against him. There had been sadistic people, hurtful and ruthless people that had hurt him for being a freak, and that was only in high school. He could only imagine how brutal they would be now.

So he dropped out of his classes and began to think about his future. Faye got home one day, after her classes, and found him curled up in their bed, alone in the dark under a mess of blankets. He was always cold it seemed. Even in the warmer months and in the heat of the air that pumped from the vents, he was cold. And his frail, almost malnourished frame made it even worse for him. His eyes seemed sunken in the light of the TV that illuminated him for Faye to see. “Icarus, honey, is this all you’ve been doing today?”

“I talked to the business program head, but, he didn’t seem to care much about the whole thing,” Rus muttered. “And even if he did care, I don’t think business is really what I want to do.”

“Well, you gotta do something,” she snapped. She kicked off her boots and sat at the edge of the bed. Her head in her hands, she let out a deep sigh, one that nearly shook the bed underneath her. Rus’s wings twitched a bit, and a few blankets fell off to the floor in response.

“Sorry I can’t do anything,” Rus said.

“What?”

“Sorry, I said. I can’t do anything to help you, right?” He seemed annoyed by the idea of it.

“Icarus, of course you can help me.”

“How? All I do… I mean, I mean all I do is just sit here, right?” He started to get even more upset, a few tears building up in his eyes. “I mean. I’m just useless.” He got up from out of the blankets and tossed them to the side. His wings came close to his back, pointed downward sharply, like they were furious. “Am I not?”

“No, you’re not useless, Icarus.”

“No,” he admitted. “But what do I have to offer?”

“To offer?” Faye still sat on the foot of the bed, her short hair visible in the bright light coming from the TV. “What does that mean, Icarus? You think you aren’t worth anything?”

“I don’t think it, Faye, I know it. I mean… I’m not good enough for music, not good enough for my friends back home, not even good enough for my dad. I mean, look at these wings.” He spread them halfway, almost knocking over a shut off lamp in the process, and looked to Faye. She was standing now. “These things are horrible, right? They… They’re just eyesores, and they get in the way, and they’re just a nuisance to everyone around me.” He looked Faye in the eyes, tears welling up in his own. “And you… I’m not good enough for you either aren’t I? I’m, I’m, I’m just a waste of space to you, like my wings, always getting in your way.”

“I don’t think they’re all that, Icarus. I… You know I’ve always loved your wings,” she was sheepish about it. But, she seemed so sad too. Her eyes drifted off as she spoke, her voice breathy and low, and her back hunched over a little bit. But Rus couldn’t tell. He just kept ranting, raving, throwing his hands around as he yelled about how much of a failure he was. All she could do was sit there and watch. She couldn’t say much, she always kept it brief so he wouldn’t snap back that she was wrong. “It’s okay, Icarus, you’re not a failure. You know I love you. You’re good enough for me. You know that right?” She held onto him. She clutched his small, frail, pale body in her arms like it was a life preserver in the middle of the ocean. Her chin nestled in the crook between his neck and his shoulder. Like a scared kitten, she looked to him, and he just sort of sat there on the bed for a bit.

“I… I don’t know why. Why? Why do you love me? Why me?” It was like it was another language in those moments.

“You’re funny, you’re lovely, you’re so sweet and kind and caring… and, and your singing voice always warms my heart.” She was starting to smile again. It wasn’t a real smile, not at first, but she knew she had to put it on for Rus. He was finally starting to calm down. She reached over for her ukelele, a lot smaller than the guitar she usually played when he would get down like this. But, the ukelele was a lot easier to play while holding onto him. “You want to sing? Come on, something calm, something good?” She played along to a tune the both of them knew well. She’d found it online one morning after they moved in together and the lyrics really spoke to her, but they were just words at the time to Rus. They sang along and Faye played for the whole night. It felt nice, but, after Rus went to sleep, Faye felt the lingering tension in the air. She couldn’t help but hurt inside.

The next few months weren’t easier, quite the opposite. Faye lost her job and soon the bills would start piling up. Rus was only starting to get his bearings again. He decided he’d write songs, maybe try to get back into CTU’s music program. But, it was slow. He was sluggish with the lyrics, never quite getting the rhythm right, and it seemed the words were never really good enough to grab his own attention, let alone anyone else. It reached a boiling point fairly soon. Rus was sprawled out on their bed, balled up sheets of notebook paper scattered about the sheets, pen scrawls just barely visible on their surface. “I can’t get it right,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?” Faye snapped back. “Did you even hear what I just said? I said the bills are piling up, Icarus. Do you want to lose the apartment?”

“We’re not gonna lose the apartment, Faye, relax.”

“Relax?” It was like she was so close to screaming. Not quite there, but Rus could hear the yell building up.

“I sold a few of the records my dad sent, they were worth a good bit of money. That should cover rent for a little while.” As he laid on his stomach on the bed, the wings on his back fluttered, a few downy feathers falling off and to the blankets underneath him.

“And what about food, Icarus? Huh? You haven’t eaten in a week, all you’ve had is water and crackers, and you’ve been sitting in this fucking room rotting away and writing shit for the past month!” She took one of the framed records off the wall and threw it across the room. As it zipped past, it brushed by one of Rus’s wings, hitting the feathers on the end a bit. It began to ache a bit. The record and the frame struck the wall behind him and shattered in almost an instant. She had thrown it hard. “I am so sick of you not taking my problems seriously! All you do is complain, and wallow, and cry about your own problems to me. And what do I do? I have to bring you out of the fucking dumps. I have to be that shoulder for you to cry on… that, that wall for you to shout at until it makes you feel better.” Rus just sat up, his wings twitching as he stared dumbfounded. His heart didn’t just drop, it felt absent, but he could feel the beating of it right in the back of his throat. The overwhelming pressure building up inside his chest and his head became so much he couldn’t speak. “I am sick and fucking tired of being there for you, and all you can do is just shrug and say it’ll be okay when I have a problem. I am done with it!”

“Faye, I,” he managed to sputter out.

“No!” She was fuming, her face red and scrunched up, eyes blazing, and tears streaming down her face, smudging the makeup under her eyes. “I have put up with your self-loathing bullshit for six months. You won’t take this away from me too. You know how it feels? You know how it feels to feel like you, you can’t say anything? You know how it feels to hear the man that you love say he isn’t enough for you? Can you even begin to imagine what it must feel like to see that person waste away and stay in this… this depressive state and not come out?” She screamed at him, screamed like her lungs were out of air, gasping and spitting with every word that blasted from her mouth. Her throat started to hurt but she just kept going. “I am done with it! I am done with being a goddamn anchor for you to clutch onto. I am done with it!” She stomped over to the door of the bedroom and threw it open. “Get out!”

“But,” Rus couldn’t even talk. He just stood up and started walking to the door. He turned around one last time, right at the front door of the apartment and just stared at her. She ran over and started beating on his chest. Her fists were small, and frail, but it wasn’t the impacts that hurt. He just cried, and he opened the front door, and he walked out into the cold air in the dead of night. His feet bare, his chest exposed and battered and bruised, his wings glumly folded up to his back, he just kept walking. He walked the streets where barely any cars passed by. It was the middle of the night, nearly 2 AM, and he simply walked all the way back to campus where even now his car lazily sat parked. He managed to get his wings working again. They had fluttered and twitched for a good minute as he tried to get them to move through the agony he felt. But, with tears steadily flowing from his eyes he took off and flew into the parking garage. He fumbled a bit with it. The landing didn’t work the way he’d hoped, and he toppled to the ground of the third floor of the garage, a few spaces away from his car.

He got in the car and slumped his body over the wheel. His phone and wallet and keys still sat firm in his pants pockets. But, for a while, he dared not touch them. For a bit of time he just sat in the driver seat and cried his eyes out. He scream-cried, yelling incoherently as the tears just kept coming and coming. His mind flashed with memories, images of Faye, and his mind clambered to try and latch onto them. They were just flying past as his whole life for the past few months crumbled in front of him. He wasn’t sure when exactly he had fallen asleep, but, the next thing he knew he woke up with his eyes burning and his chest aching. The sun was bright as it burst through the windshield. For a moment, just a second, he had thought it had all been a nightmare. Just a bad dream that he’d finally woken up from. But then he looked down and saw the bruises on his chest. He saw the tear stains that burrowed into the fabric of his pants. It wasn’t just a nightmare. He reached into his right pocket and found his cellphone, nearly dead, and opened it up. No messages from Faye. Quickly, he tried to send her a text, just a simple ‘hey’ to start, but it wouldn’t go through. He was blocked.

The next thing he did was open the phone app, and he called the only person he could really trust. It rang for a while, one time, then twice, three times still. And then he picked up. “Rus? I haven’t heard from you in months, what… what’s up?” His dad’s voice sent chills down his spine, but, the chills soon melted into his skin and he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Dad… I’m coming home today. We need to talk.” The two talked for a few minutes, it was a good conversation. Rus cracked a smile a few times. But, every time he would lose it, that feeling of emptiness and pain just came crawling back to replace the warmth of the smiles. His dad seemed eager to see Rus again, so he hung up the phone after their conversation had dwindled down to nothing more than mere mutterings, put the key into the ignition, and started up the car.

There was no singing along to happy music this time. Now when he played the same songs he had belted out on the way to his new life, he listened close to the lyrics, and his mind began to notice. The same words he sang before now burrowed into his brain and ached as they sat there. He finally understood the words. It was like a whole language had always been there, and he was mocking it, never fully grasping at what the words meant. But he knew now. He wished he hadn’t but, there was no changing it. So he sat behind the wheel silent as he drove all the way back to his house in his hometown. No stops into a field to gaze at stars this time, just a straight shot toward the only place left for him to go. He pulled up in his car, which was starting to make some strange noises from deep within the engine, and shut it off just as his dad was rushing out of the house. Rus got out of the car and walked up the lawn with his head hung low. His dad ran up and hugged him, easily lifting his scrawny body off the ground with his bear hug. “Rus, my boy. God. What happened to you?” He said it softly, and the words really dug at Rus. What did happen? How did it all go so wrong? It was like the words his dad spoke punched all the bruises on his chest and made them ache all over again.

The two of them spent the next few weeks trying to bring Rus up from the deep depression he had found himself in. They went fishing, ate lunches together, even played music a couple times. But, the music was hard to do for Rus. The singing, the guitar, it all reminded him of Faye and their time together. He was starting to have panic attacks if he got too into his singing. His mind would race, and it would start a chain reaction like a gust of wind to a tornado, all just thoughts bouncing from one to the next. It was such a foreign thing to him, something that used to fill him with such a happiness now robbed him of his breath, took away his ability to control his own body until he just shut down. But, his dad was always there to help him. He was someone Rus could always trust, he thought, someone that would stick it through with him no matter what happened. And Rus liked that he had someone. A few days after his dad had to return to work, when his time was more occupied with it than with Rus, Rus decided to reach back out to some of his friends.

He reached out to Leon first, maybe it would be easier to connect to him now that they’ve been out of touch for so long. Surprisingly, Leon responded within a few minutes. He expressed how busy he was, off in Hollywood doing camera work for some up and coming indie films, but that he somehow always had time for friends. He’d made a lot of connections and friends in the industry and he was successful. For some reason, after he put down the phone, stopped texting Leon and thought about it, Rus felt sick. The feeling only got worse when Seth answered his texts. Seth was doing swimmingly, enrolled in engineering courses at the local community college, found himself a girl that he loved and that loved him. The two were inseparable. She had helped Seth get through the stress of his brother’s death, which Rus had only just heard about, and the two had been together ever since. Hearing that story, it made Rus feel like his head was swimming in a gray whirlpool, frantically scrambling to escape only to be tossed to the jagged rocks again. It was like those jagged rocks were becoming home.

He took a walk through the house he lived in, a small little thing, and one that just didn’t feel like his home anymore. The halls were barren of photos. He had never really taken any for picture day, afraid that everyone would just make fun of him even more or scribble out his picture from the yearbook. The liquor cabinet was empty of the stuff, replaced with fine china his grandmother had given them as a gift after his mom died. He couldn’t even drink some of the sadness away. Even if he could, he thought, it wouldn’t do very much to help. He would still be in the same poor spot he was without the drink. Staring at nothing but the floor, his chaotic, storming thoughts came to a head, and he rushed to the garage. He found a knife, a saw of sorts, with crooked little notches like individual teeth on a handsaw. The grip he had on it was firm as he quickly walked into the bathroom.

His eyes stared into the mirror. He looked at all the bruises and scars he had on his bare chest, sunken in stomach and exposed ribs bulging through the pale skin. He looked deep within himself, right into his dull blue eyes, and he just felt nothing. Finally, he looked to the wings. The damn wings. The white wings on his back were halfway unfurled, the feathers sagging like depressed flowers, the light almost illuminating them. He reached the knife behind him and placed the blade to one of the wings. He could feel the sharp edges of the saw teeth right on the flesh, right at the tips of each and every little feather, and it was cold. It took everything within him to not saw the damn things off right then and there, just go wild with it. Faye had loved them, Seth, Leon, his first girlfriend. They were all so much better than him.

He started to move the blade of the knife and felt the pain of the teeth digging into his feathers and skin. Blood dripped slowly but sped up in volume in an instant. And all of a sudden he felt it. He felt it like nothng he had ever felt before, pain, pain that shot through his whole body and forced his fingers open. The knife clattered to the bathroom floor with a sound that barely even registered in Rus’s mind. He stared into the mirror and saw the blood soak into his white feathers. Like burning fire in snow the red dripped only slightly to the floor, just little droplets, one after the other in slow succession. His mouth stood agape as he looked at what he’d done, just a gash in one of his wings, but it was substantial. The bleeding got a bit worse. He dared not even touch it, the blood would simply soak into the feathers at the base of his wings and dry up later. But right then he couldn’t think of that. He couldn’t much think of anything. He just stared and watched the blood stain in his wing grow and grow, until the stress and the throbbing pain got to his head and he fell to his knees.

In an instant the door was thrown open. “Rus!” His dad’s voice practically shouted in his ears as his head snapped toward the door.

“Dad, no,” he muttered.

“Rus, oh god. Rus. No.” His dad crouched down to the ground and held his son, some of the blood dripping onto his hand and then onto one of his pant legs. “Rus. Not you.”

“I’m sorry, dad. I’m sorry.” Rus muttered it, his eyes glazed over like he was looking at nothing, his body limp as his father held him. He couldn’t find the strength to move. “I’m sorry I’m not strong enough.”

His dad held him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Rus, don’t say that, you can’t say that,” he pleaded. “Come on. Please be okay. Please,” he said. He looked down at his son’s back, at the gash in his right wing, and he saw the blood. His heart dropped. But, he saw too that it was barely a deep cut at all. He got up and reached up to the medicine cabinet, pulling it open and grasping for something, knocking over pill bottles and tubes of ointment. Pulling from it a roll of bandages, he started to unravel it and began to wrap it around the injured wing. “You’re gonna be okay, Rus. You’re gonna be okay.” Rus’s dad had tears in his eyes. They came down his cheeks and fell off his stubbled blond jaw faster than he could hope to keep track of.

“Dad,” Rus muttered.

“No, it’s alright. It’s okay. It’s okay, I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Rus, you’re gonna be okay.” He frantically wrapped up the wing until the bandages were soaking with blood, held taut to the base of the wing. “I’m gonna fix you right up.”

“Dad, please. Dad.” He couldn’t say much else. His brain just went blank, his breathing became manual. There was a small part of his brain that hoped he wouldn’t fall into another panic attack. “Dad,” he mumbled again. His consciousness was starting to fade. It wasn’t as though the blood loss was getting to him, or even that he was physically tired. The weight of the world and everything he had ever gone through all just crashed down on him all at once, and somehow it made him feel not overwhelmed, but empty. So he sat there on that bathroom floor in his father’s arms feeling emptier and emptier until he finally fell asleep.

Rus woke up in his bed. It was light out, sun shining bright into the open blinds in his room as he tossed off a few blankets. His chest was still bare and covered in now fading bruises and scars. He looked over to his digital alarm clock, the same one he’d had through high school, the old wooden trim one with red numbers pulsing back at him as he stared. The time seemed normal, about one in the afternoon. But something felt off. Soon enough he got up and passed by a mirror, and he saw the bandages, clean now, wrapped around his right wing. As his feet creaked on the hardwood flooring, he heard the door to his room open. “You’re awake,” his dad said stepping into the room.

“Yeah,” Rus muttered.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Alive. Breathing. Tired,” he said, and he let out a little chuckle.

Rus’s dad smiled. He reached to his back pocket and pulled something from it, a deck of playing cards, a sight that made Rus smile a bit wider than his dad. “If you’d like, I could kick your ass in some Go Fish? Blackjack? War? Your pick, buddy.” He didn’t need some long talk. Rus knew it, his dad knew it. After that he just needed to unwind a bit. He’d talk when it was time, and the time would come, but now wasn’t the time. The two of them sat on the floor in front of Rus’s bed and played cards until the nighttime came. They barely noticed the light change outside the window, focused on the cards, focused on the jokes and stories the two of them were telling each other. He knew these times happened a lot more recently. Sometimes he had worried if they were just pity, pity for Rus and the wings that got him into more and more trouble with himself. But this wasn’t one of those times. No, this time the two just smiled and laughed and played cards with no sense of pity from either side.

Rus’s dad stayed in the room with him for the night. They both laid on the bed, Rus close to his dad, like he’d done when he was a little kid. “Hey, dad,” he spoke up.

“What’s up, Rus?” His dad was smiling the entire time. It was like in that day, playing the cards and laying together in the bed, he finally had his son back who’d been gone since Nina died.

“You loved mom, right?”

“You kidding? Of course I did. Your mom, she was the best person I could have met.”

“When did you meet her?” Rus was like a child again, staring up at his father with doe eyes and an inquisitive face.

“Your mom?” He lifted his head up in thought, sorting through memories for a few moments. “Well, I was pretty old when I met her. Thirty-five, I had just gotten a promotion for work that took me all the way to the downtown area, crummy apartment and everything. The works. And well, your mom lived next door to me.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Though, she didn’t even notice me for the longest time. Nina, she had this habit of going into tunnel-vision, just setting her target straight with no room to look away. But eventually she noticed me, and we started talking, went on a few dates, got married, and the rest is history.”

“It took you that long to find her? I mean, what was it like?”

“If I’m honest, I started to think I never would find her. Well, not just her, but anyone really.” He ran his fingers through Rus’s platinum blond hair, roughing it up, making it a bit of a mess on his head. “I suffered through a lot, trying to find myself, where I belonged. Couple that with some failed relationships and I was a mess. I thought I couldn’t be happy at all. But, I just focused on me. I thought, if I could figure out how to love me, I won’t need anyone else. And shortly after I figured that out I met your mom.” Rus’s dad shed a couple tears, wiping them away with a corner of one of the thinner felt blankets bundled up near the two of them. He pat Rus’s head, the nearly white blond hair fluffy and a little wavy, and he smiled. “Just learn to love yourself, Rus. You can’t make anyone love you. So, loving yourself, it helps with the loneliness. Plus, confidence looks good to anyone,” he said with a smile.

The words were practically all it took to lull Rus to sleep. He slept better than he had in months, and he woke up to fresh made breakfast by his dad. The smell of bacon and eggs, syrup over pancakes, wafted into his room from the kitchen. It didn’t take much of smelling it until he got up and walked toward the alluring scent. “Morning,” Rus said with a yawn, “you’re up early.”

“Guess it is kind of early, huh?” His dad flipped one of the pancakes, launching it into the air, only to have it come down and slap against the floor. “Whoops,” he said plainly. “Well, I guess that can’t all be perfect.” He looked to Rus and smiled, and the boy with the wings smiled brightly in return. As his dad threw out the ruined pancake, Rus sat down and scrolled through his phone. He opened up his notebook app, rifled through a few of the notes he’d started, smatterings of lyrics for songs he’d yet to finish writing. “I got a question for you,” Rus’s dad said, his back turned, his attention firmly on the sizzling bacon in one of the other pans on the stove.

Rus reached ahead and grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl, carefully choosing one of the ones that hadn’t begun rotting already. “What’s up?” He took a bite out of the apple. It was sweet almost immediately, a taste that filled his mouth and refreshed him, shaking the last of the tiredness from his mind.

“You ever been to The Saffron Diner?” His dad turned off the burner for the pan with the bacon and drained the grease in the nearby sink.

Rus lazily chewed on the chunk of apple, the feathers in his wings twitching a little bit, the ones in his right wing barely moving as much as the left. But there was some movement. He supposed it was a good sign, that feeling was coming back in spite of the injury. “The diner on the way to the high school, right? Never actually been there.” He finished chewing the piece of apple and finally swallowed it down, just as his dad placed a full plate of bacon down on the counter in front of him, grease dripping on paper towels underneath.

“Well, now’s your chance, I got you a job there.” His dad said it so simply, like it was a normal, everyday thing.

He placed the plate of pancakes and the plate of eggs down next to the bacon, but Rus was too taken aback to start eating just yet. “You what?”

“A job. I was friends with the owner back in college, good guy, and pulled a couple strings so to speak.” As he said it he put his fingers up in air quotes. “There’s an interview on monday, but that’s pretty much just a formality. All you gotta do is answer some basic questions and Jim’ll take care of the rest. No dress code, cash payment every friday, and you get a bit of a discount on the food.” He reached over and grabbed a piece of bacon, bitting a chunk off. “Wow, that is definitely still hot,” he said, blowing air from his mouth as he chewed.

The next few days leading up to his first day nearly got Rus back into that depressive state he found himself in so often. But, there was something keeping him from it. He started to see things in a more positive light. Having a job would mean money, and money meant he could buy things he wanted, namely instruments and recording equipment to start working even harder at his music career. He hadn’t given up on it just yet. It meant he could focus more on the job and less on the things plaguing him. There wasn’t much time to worry about what he’d done to Faye, how he was pathetic compared to his friends, when he was too busy serving food at a fairly busy restaurant during the days. It meant he could meet new people most of all. Coworkers, customers, all people to talk to and maybe show that he wasn’t just a freak with wings. He was Rus. He was funny and charming, interesting to talk to, he thought. And more people might be able to see that now. When that monday finally came he walked into the diner with a slight smile on his face, and his usual outfit of a simple white sweater and brown pants, holes cut out in the back of the sweater where his wings stuck out.

“There he is!” A portly man with a full beard shouted from behind the front counter. It was early in the morning, so not very many customers to hear him, but the ones that were there looked over to him with raised eyebrows. He hobbled over to Rus, and he could see he was quite short. “You must be Icarus, yeah? The boy with the wings. Oh man, your dad and I, we go way back. I mean way back. Freshman year of college, we got up to so many crazy antics.” He just sort of rambled on. At first, it scared Rus, made him feel a bit uneasy. But then he realized, Jim was just another guy. He was smiling, laughing, recounting the stories about him and Rus’s dad, and it brought a smile to Rus’s face too in a short while. “Oh there I go talking someone else’s ear off,” he said with a heavy chuckle. “Let’s get you into the kitchen, I’ll show you around, then I’ll show you the ropes of waitin’ tables, yeah?”

Just like that Rus was back in the swing of things. He came in to work every day with a smile on his face, ready to help. Even if some mornings it was a fake smile, by the end of the day, it’d turned to a real one, a big toothy grin that brightened up the customers he served. He got to know a few of the regulars, an older couple that came in every friday and sunday, one of his old teachers from high school, even a few students he had just barely known when he still went to school. He was beginning to get more and more comfortable too. In the later hours, when there was barely anyone in the diner, he would wash dishes in between table runs and sing. It was hard for him to be singing again, but he just wanted to sing again. He’d sing softer songs that he’d loved as a kid. He’d sing melancholy or relaxing versions of more aggressive songs. Sometimes, right before closing time, he would sing some of his own lyrics, testing them to see what worked and what didn’t. There was one customer during those sorts of night shifts, another regular, who always wore a hood over his head. He didn’t pay much mind to it, thought it just some quiet guy that kept to himself, barely asked for much more than hot cocoa on particularly cold nights.

But, maybe about six months after he started work, a bombshell hit him. During one of his lunch breaks, he got a call on his phone, from a number he had long forgotten. “Hello?”

“Icarus,” the voice on the other end spoke.

He recognized the voice. For a second, he questioned his own sanity, but then remembered exchanging numbers with her during his short stint at CTU. “Maya?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What are you… why are you calling me? You stopped talking to me after I left CTU, after everything happened with Faye.” Even saying her name was murder on his nerves. He got up from his seat near the backroom, heading out the back door they used for shipments of food and things, and stood outside in the cold. It was one of the colder nights, cold enough he could see his breath. He didn’t know exactly how many people were in the diner, he had only seen the guy in the hood, but he didn’t want to bother or disturb them with his phone call. “I can’t believe you still have my number.”

“I can’t either, I mean, I thought you were the worst for so long,” she said. It made Rus’s heart drop a bit. He was handling it a lot better than he thought he had any right to be. Having someone this close to Faye, so connected to his past at CTU, it was hard to swallow.

His breathing jumped a bit. “Why are you calling me, Maya. I have to get back to work in like, five minutes, I can’t be on the phone like thi-”

“It’s about Faye, Icarus. She was cheating on you.”

Rus nearly fell down. His breathing got so much heavier, visible in the light from a nearby lamppost shining down on him. “I… What?”

“She was cheating on you. I, I don’t know how else to say it.”

“When?” Rus asked plainly.

“What? What do you mean,” she started.

“When was she doing it?” Rus nearly shouted. He said it so sternly, so firmly, it was like he was yelling but not nearly as loudly. His demeanor was cold and unflinching.

“I… I think it was about a few weeks before you left. She was messing around with this guy in our music theory class, an ex of hers, going on dates with him, said she loved him. But it was while you two were still dating.” Rus just sort of went silent. He didn’t really cry, he didn’t even feel bad. His heart calmed down and levelled out with its beating. “Icarus? You still there?”

“Hm?” He sort of smiled, a half-cocked smile that sickened him. “Yeah, I’m still here.”

“She’s leaving CTU to transfer to another school with him. Guess they have some sort of band or something going on, nothing really major. I know we don’t know each other very well, but, if you ever need to talk to someone about this, I’ll be here to text. You were a dick but, even you don’t deserve that kind of shit.” Maya hung up the phone shortly after that as Rus went silent.

He put the phone into his back pocket and pushed through the back door of the diner. His break was still going, and as he walked into the lobby of the place, he saw that there was no one left at the tables. Except for one. It was a booth, a window seat, one that shined red glowing light from the neon ‘open’ sign hanging just outside it. Rus just wanted to talk to someone, get his mind off everything if only for a few minutes. He walked over and sat down across from the guy in the hood. His wings got in the way at first, but soon he got a bit more comfortable in the booth, feeling the softness of the cushions underneath him. “I may be on break, but I can still get you a cup of coffee or cocoa if you’d like,” he said with a smile.

“No need, really. Just want to sit here,” the guy said. He had a very smooth and calming voice.

“I’m Rus, by the way.”

“I know.” He pointed up and to Rus’s chest, and for a second his finger looked red in the light. Rus looked down and saw the nametag pinned to his apron. “Not just that, but uh, you also say your name every time you first greet me after coming in.” He let out a little chuckle, and Rus laughed a bit too, his wings fluttering softly on his back.

“I guess I do that, huh?” He got just a bit more comfortable, leaning toward the window and stretching out his legs in the booth seat. “So, you do have a name right?”

“Belial.”

“Interesting. And I thought I had everyone beat with the unique names. Though, guess there’s only so many names you can give to a baby with wings, right?” He pointed to them, and Belial looked up from the table, his eyes glinting in the light around them from under the hood. They were yellow. Not like pale yellow or sickly, but really yellow, glowing like goldenrod in the buzzing lights above.

“I like your singing,” Belial said with a smile.

“My singing? You’ve heard it?”

“Almost every night, yeah.”

“Oh god, that’s more than a little embarrassing.” He blushed a bit, covering his face with his hand.

“Not at all. You have a really good voice, but, you’re not very loud with it are you?”

“No. Not really. It can be hard to sing sometimes, it’s sort of a long story why.” 

Rus got a bit quieter, but Belial leaned a bit close over the table and smiled again. He reached his hands to his hood and pulled it down behind his head. Rus hadn’t imagined it, his hands really were red, but that wasn’t all that was odd. Belial’s eyes were yellow, black almond pupils like a snake, and the rest of his skin red as well. He had stark black hair and a gray beanie clinging onto the back of his head. But, most out of the ordinary were what rested just below his hairline on his forehead. Horns. Sharp, pointing upward, and dark brown. Real, actual, horns, staring Rus right in the face. “You know, a guy looking like me, I don’t really want to go out much. I’m perfectly fine here though. So, for what it’s worth, it doesn’t matter how long a story it is, I’ve got the time.” He smiled so warmly it nearly sent Rus’s heart into a frenzy. “Sorry, hope I’m not weirding you out or anything.”

“No!” Rus interjected. His wings unfurled just a little bit, and the right wing began to ache as the scarred wound stretched a bit more than it was used to. Rus winced in pain, the skin above his nose scrunching a bit.

“You alright?” Belial sat up in his seat but Rus eased him back down quickly.

“Yeah, not a big deal. Just a cut on one of my wings.”

“Wings. I almost forgot they were there.”

“What? You did?”

“Yeah. I mean, they’re pretty and all, but I’m sort of used to them. I see them every time I come in here after all.” Belial leaned back in his seat, very lax, almost aloof. But it was clear he very much cared about talking with Rus. He was engaged in the conversation, making eye contact with him, nodding along as he talked, listening intently at everything he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t brought up my looks at this point.”

“Your looks?”

“Uh,” he pointed up to the horns, and as he smiled, Rus saw two sharp little fangs peeking from his top row of teeth, “the horns?” He kicked his foot out, and even in the high top sneakers, Rus could tell he had hooves and hairy legs. “I look like a damn devil. Least, that’s what everyone’s always told me.”

“Hey, I look like an angel, and I’m still a freak,” Rus said. Belial laughed. He genuinely laughed, and Rus got happier, his smile growing as he sat there talking with him.  
The two talked all through the night, and after explaining what had happened, Jim decided to let Rus have the rest of the night until closing off and that he’d handle the rest of the waiting tables in the meantime. It wasn’t like there was much to do anyway. There was only the two of them left in the diner, sitting across from each other in the booth, laughing and talking about themselves, how things were for the both of them on any given day. Rus didn’t get too much into his past, but he didn’t feel the need to. It didn’t matter. He was a different person, and not just because of the scar on his wing. The two talked every time Belial came in and Rus was working. Weeks passed by and they quickly became good friends.

One night, Belial came in with his hood down and one of his horns broken off. He was bleeding from the nose. One of his eyes was swollen and puffy, his bottom lip too, and he was limping a little bit. Rus practically ran back into the kitchen to grab a bag of ice they’d used for the freezer. He brought it out to Belial, who sat down at his usual booth, and he sat down across from him. Rus didn’t say anything. “Heh, well, I guess you’re my guardian angel, huh?”

“Guardian angel, freak with wings, it’s all semantics. Right?” That made Belial laugh a bit. Rus leaned forward and rested his hands on the table. His wings moved freely now, since the bandages over his right wing were gone, and the wound fully healed to leave a visible scar. “Belial, what happened?”

Belial was hesitant at first. He looked away from Rus, his puffy eye turned away from him. The horn still intact was coated in a thin spattering of blood. Rus was patient though. He waited as Belial thought of the way to say it, if he would even say it at all. But Belial did talk. “I got into a fight again.”

“Again?”

“I do it a lot. There’s this group of guys, known them since high school, and they’ve always had it out for me. To make a long story a bit shorter, I fell for this one girl, and she just so happened to be one of their sisters.” He smiled a bit, but quickly shook it off and continued talking. “Since then, I guess they don’t like the demon doing anything near them.”

“What did you do? Not that you really did anything wrong, I just, I want to know what pissed them off you know?”

“I sort of snapped at one of them. Geoff, the bigger of them, he kept tugging on my horns.” He pointed up at them, the horns, each one with markings that told a story all on their own. “So, I punched him in the gut. He kept taunting me. Told me that’s why my dad killed himself, cause these horns reminded him he was the devil. I can’t stand that little shit.” He hit his fist against the table, knocking over the salt shaker, and breathed a hefty sigh from his nose. “Nobody talks about my dad like that. I don’t even do it. Dad was someone I loved, maybe one of the few people I have loved, and I’m not gonna let some piss-stain badmouth him like that. You understand that kinda feeling Rus?”

Rus was taken aback. He rarely called him by his name, maybe hadn’t ever, just called him ‘wingboy’ or ‘angel’ like nicknames. But now, now it was like he was really talking to Rus now, talking right to his heart directly. Rus heaved a hefty sigh of his own and leaned forward, his head down and his eyes on his hands. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I’ve had a lot of people like that. There was my friends, my exes, but they’ve kinda gone their own ways without me.”

“What about people you still feel that way for?” Belial raised an eyebrow, as a bit of blood dripped from down his nostrils across his upper lip. He quickly wiped it away with his sleeve.  
“Oh. Well. My dad is probably my absolute best friend. He’s helped me through my worst times, even stuck by me when I was a worse person than I am now, and he’s always been able to make me smile.” Rus smiled just thinking about all the times the two of them hung out, fishing and playing card games and making each other laugh with dumb jokes. “And my mom…” Rus got quiet. His hands started to shake a bit, a lot calmer than they would have been a few months ago, but they still shook.

Belial saw and immediately reached his hand out, placing it atop Rus’s clasped ones. “Hey, it’s alright,” he said softly. Rus looked up, and even through the puffy lip and bloody nose Belial smiled. “I understand the feeling. Really, I do. It’s not easy to lose someone you were that close to. I lost dad when I was ten, and, it was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through. You don’t need to talk about what happened with your mom until you’re okay with it.” Belial had easily anticipated Rus’s fears, his anxieties, and responded. Rus’s hands stopped shaking. The feathers on his wings even fluttered a bit. His mouth sort of hung open for a bit, just staring at Belial with a face of awe. “You gonna be okay?’

“Belial, I’m gonna tell you something I’ve never told anyone. It’s something that has haunted me for so long now. But, I’m gonna tell you, and then I’m gonna ask you a question.”  
Belial was confused at first. But, the confusion soon subsided and he wore a focused look, nodding. “Go for it.”

Rus detailed his life with Faye. He told of how he couldn’t stand the sight of his own wings during those times, thought everyone hated him, even Faye herself. His heart dropped as he described all the times he accused her of hating the wings. When, all the while, he was the one with a vendetta against them. He told Belial how he was kicked out only to come back home and try cutting the wings off. Belial just simply sat all the way through it, holding out his hand during more stressful parts of Rus’s talking. But, when he was finished, Rus grabbed Belial’s hand firmly. “I trust you, Belial. And I like you. I like you a lot. And, I’ve never really been able to do this myself but, would you want to go on a date with me?” Rus blushed hard as he said it, and as Belial’s heart came back up from the pit of his stomach, he began to chuckle. “What? What is it?” Rus questioned, confused.

“You’re really somethin’ special aren’t you? Yeah, sure Rus, I’ll go on a date with you.” He wiped away a bit more of the blood from his nose and then gestured with his hands all around him, showing off the diner they sat in that the both of them had grown to know like a second home. As he looked to Rus, the two of them smiled widely at each other. Rus blushed, an incredibly obvious red that shone through his pale skin and contrasted greatly with his platinum blond hair. Belial blushed too, enough that Rus could see it through the soft red skin of his cheeks. “How’s dinner sound?”


End file.
